Baghdad

One United States soldier was killed and a second wounded on Wednesday when their four-vehicle convoy hit a roadside explosive device north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

A car bomb killed 11 people and wounded 57 when it exploded outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad on Thursday, causing rage and panic in the bloodiest attack in the capital since Saddam Hussein was toppled four months ago.

The bodies of the two slain sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, underwent ”facial reconstruction” before they were shown to international correspondents on Friday, a US military official said.

Iraqis reacted with a mixture of scepticism, suspicion and some relief on Friday to the release of pictures of the bloodied corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, with many still in disbelief that the dreaded brothers were really killed.

The top US ground commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, said here on Wednesday he had no doubt that US forces had killed Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Uday and Qusay.

The commander of US ground forces in Iraq said on Wednesday that US troops launched an all-out assault on the hideout of Saddam Hussein’s sons after they spurned an offer to surrender.

Soldiers of toppled president Saddam Hussein’s armed forces faced off in tense protests on Monday with US troops as they demanded payment of their first salaries in four months.

Most US troops on the ground in Baghdad have no say in how the Iraqi capital is rebuilt, but many are laying down their own blueprint of the city — with American street names ousting the traditional Arabic.

United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week claimed that the political and security situation in Iraq was improving, in spite of attacks on United States soldiers and sabotage of electricity and oil supplies.

At last free from the terror created by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Baghdad’s women say they have suffered long enough and deserve a better future.

Mohammed Said as-Sahhaf’s surprise re-emergence has stunned Iraqis, although many joked that Saddam Hussein’s famed wartime ”lying machine” who appeared with his hair turned white was ”his older brother”.

US security concerns have clashed with Iraq’s traditional culture in a potentially volatile flap over American men frisking Iraqi women.

Ahmed Abdullah Sallal was 10 years old when his cousin put a knife in his hand and ordered him to kill a man.

The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime has left the Al-Luaibis and middle class families like them struggling to survive in a country they barely recognise.

Less than two weeks after the collapse of the regime, thousands of members of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist party, the all too willing instrument of Saddam, are resuming their roles as the men and women who run Iraq.

Uday, Saddam Hussein’s feared elder son, had several hobbies: women, cars, the Internet, jewelry, weapons, the Shiite branch of Islam, alcohol and especially torture.

US forces on Tuesday tried to hamper the media from covering a third day of anti-American protests by Iraqis outside a hotel housing a US operations base here.

It was a slow collapse. The statue of Saddam Hussein, huge and commanding, resisted the crowds tugging on the noose around its neck for two hours. Thirty years of brutality and lies were coming to a close — not decisively, not in full measure, not without deep fears for the future or resentment at this deliverance by a foreign army — but on a day of stunning changes.

Embattled African National Congress MP Winnie Madikizela-Mandela jetted into Baghdad’s international airport last night on a chartered flight to begin her tour of duty as a human shield.

Five South African ”human shields” may ”reluctantly” return to South Africa from Iraq due to family pressures and the ”extreme realities of a war situation”, the Iraq Action Committee (IAC) said on Saturday.

As US and British forces swarmed into Iraq on Friday, reports from the front said that Iraqi forces had set fire to oil wells in the southern parts of the country.

Britain and the United States have all but fired the first shots of the second Gulf war by dramatically extending the range of targets in the ”no-fly zones” over Iraq to soften up the country for an allied ground invasion.

UN weapons inspectors checked a pit on Thursday where Iraq says it destroyed biological warheads, after the chief inspector said Iraq has been more cooperative but hasn’t taken ”a fundamental decision” to disarm.

President Saddam Hussein is trapped between the demands of the UN disarmament process that continues to sap his hold on power and the threat of a US-led military offensive to oust him, diplomats in Baghdad said on Tuesday.

It is a darkening Saturday evening in Baghdad. The shops are closing and the roads are blocked with traffic. At the side of one congested dual carriageway in the north-east of the city a group of friends have gathered at a small, whitewashed theatre.

Italian tortellini pasta, Camembert cheese from France, or Thai oyster sauce: a delicatessen in the heart of sanctions-struck Baghdad sells all of life’s little luxuries, if you can afford them.

Health minister Manto Tshabala-Msimang expressed South Africa’s commitment to strengthen relations with Iraq during a visit to the Arab country, her department said in a statement on Friday.

At least seven groups of UN weapons inspectors were out on Tuesday searching for suspected weapons of mass destruction, focusing on Iraq’s germ warfare capabilities.